The Persistence of Whiteness

Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Daniel Bernardi, Daniel Bernardi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135976446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Persistence of Whiteness investigates the representation and narration of racein contemporary Hollywood cinema. Ideologies of class, ethnicity, gender, nation and sexuality are central concerns as are the growth of the business of filmmaking. Focusing onrepresentations of Black, Asian, Jewish, Latina/oand Native Americans identities, this collection also shows how whiteness is a fact everywhere in contemporary Hollywood cinema, crossing audiences, authors, genres, studios and styles.

Bringing together essays from respected film scholars, the collection covers a wide range of important films, including Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Color Purple, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. Essays also consider genres from the western to blaxploitation and new black cinema; provocative filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles and Steven Spielberg and stars including Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Lopez.

Daniel Bernardi provides an in-depth introduction, comprehensive bibliographyand a helpful glossary of terms, thus providing students with an accessible and topical collection on race and ethnicity in contemporary cinema.

Part I

Generic history

Chapter 1

Manifest myth-making

Texas history in the movies

Charles Ramírez Berg

Over more than a decade and a half I have researched and written on Latino images in US cinema, resulting in several articles and book chapters, and culminating in a book, Latino Images in Film, published in 2002.¹ Since then, I have expanded my critical focus to analyze not only the images themselves, but also the matrix from which they sprang. The first piece along these lines looked at the discourse about Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Southern California during the first third of the last century, the time when the film industry relocated there and established itself as a leading world cinema.² I continue the investigation of context and imagery here by sketching out the ways that the basic Hollywood adventure narrative – and the concomitant stereotyping of Latinos and Others – was overdetermined by the nineteenth-century American experience of westward expansion.

My claim is that although Hollywood’s familiar three-act quest plot, the basis for many of its action films, had many classic antecedents, the American experience gave it a distinctive, local inflection. Specifically, the three-act structure found in Hollywood adventures and Westerns had two major shaping influences. The first is the dogma of America’s civil religion, positing the USA as a nation of God’s chosen people who were delivered to a Promised Land. The second is the nineteenth-century enactment of this doctrine, Manifest Destiny, which can be considered the civil religion’s “continental crusade,” the impetus for the settling and annexation of the West by the USA. Viewed from this perspective, Hollywood films, particularly those about the “winning of the west,” proselytized Manifest Destiny, simplifying and organizing the experience into a coherent conquest myth that recounted the “crusade’s” exploits in epic, God’s-on-our-side, happy-ending fashion. The purpose of Hollywood’s “Manifest myth-making” was to rationalize – and sanitize – the history of the USA’s North American imperialism and transform it into an entertaining, guilt-free narrative that conformed to core American beliefs (liberty, democracy, freedom, equality) and values (truth, honesty, fair play).

A tall order, to be sure, but the result can be clearly seen in Westerns, which deal directly with westward expansion. Therefore, in order to examine how Manifest Destiny informed Hollywood movies and how both were derived from civil religious dogma, in this essay I will discuss Hollywood Westerns that recount the birth of Texas by analyzing six films: Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948) and five Alamo movies: the D.W. Griffith-produced Martyrs of the Alamo, or The Birth of Texas (1915), Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1954), Frank Lloyd’s The Last Command (1955), John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960), and the most recent version, John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo (2004).

This is primarily a work of narratology. I’m not interested in comparing history and movies in order to grouse about Hollywood’s changes and distortions – movies always alter history. Rather, I want to begin to understand how America’s civil religion and Manifest Destiny combined with Hollywood’s adventure narrative paradigm to form a colonizing master movie narrative: a stirring quest story of a God-fearing, Anglo male protagonist who enters, claims, tames, and civilizes the wilderness. Of course, it is impossible to make America’s foundational values (equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) jibe with the thievery and violence that characterized much of what was perpetrated under the banner of Manifest Destiny. So it should not be surprising that the history of Manifest Destiny, the crusade as well as Hollywood’s recounting of it, is deeply conflicted ideologically. The acceptance of the assumptions driving Manifest Destiny policy and the ensuing crusade was widespread, but not universal. There were always pockets of disagreement and resistance, stemming from differing interpretations of the nation’s civil religious doctrine, just as there was an ongoing debate about its enactment as the Manifest Destiny campaign. Similarly, regarding Hollywood’s mythologizing of that history, there were reluctant and resistant filmmakers whose films questioned or sometimes subverted the prevailing doctrine.

Looking at the Alamo films treated here in rough chronological order, we see an interesting progression from simplistic legend formation to richer and more complex treatments of the battle. Griffith’s Martyrs of the Alamo is the earliest existing movie version (none of the previous ones have survived), and it is the Ur-text, establishing the Alamo movie formula in the simplest partisan and racist terms. Though less blatant, Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier carefully follows the Martyrs of the Alamo’s narrative template; it is the best structured, most straightforward and economical telling of the Alamo legend, taking just 30 minutes of screen time. Like these two films, Wayne’s rendition is uncritical of Manifest Destiny, but its presentation of the Texas – Mexican conflict is far from one-sided, displaying sensitivity to Mexican history and culture. And Frank Lloyd’s The Last Command is more complex still, presenting a nuanced account of Tejano and Texas colonial culture as well as the events leading up to the battle.

Finally, Hancock’s The Alamo tries to debunk received history and revise the Alamo sub-genre. But, judging by its lackluster box office performance and so-so critical reception, it paid a heavy price for doing so.³ The film’s failed revisionism is illuminating, however, in revealing how Hollywood’s queststory template not only affirms the national civil religion and supports Manifest Destiny, but also fulfills key movie narrative functions, such as providing a coherent dramatic structure, clarifying heroic character motivation, and delivering a happy ending. Hancock’s tampering with history undermined all that.

One non-Alamo film, Hawks’ Red River, is included here because it too covers the birth of Texas, the state as cattle empire. As Robert Sklar notes in one of the earliest essays to chart the film’s ideological undercurrents, Red River is “a film about the notions of empire.… about the territorial expansion of one society by the usurpation of land from others, and the consequences arising therefrom.”⁴ The fascinating thing about it – what, in fact, may account for its classic status – is just how ideologically conflicted it is. Its intent at the start, however, seems simple and single-minded. An introductory note scrolling on the screen before the action begins, accompanied by Dimitri Tiomkin’s grandiose theme music, states the film’s straightforward goal: to depict the founding of cattle ranching in Texas and recount the heroic saga of the first cattle drive along the Chisolm Trail. Then the film proper begins. Act I takes place 15 years after the Battle of the Alamo, then the rest of the film jumps ahead nearly 15 years after that, and, as the story unfolds, the jubilant jingoism is gradually undercut by a critical examination of the ruthlessness beneath imperialism. For all its exultant trappings, Red River is an exploration into the toxic effects of enacting Manifest Destiny. It is thus a good place to begin our discussion because its cowboy-turned-rancher protagonist demonstrates the poisonous workings of Manifest Destiny on a human scale.

The human toll of Manifest Destiny

Red River’s first act is a fictionalized account of the origins of Texas’s famed King Ranch. Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and his cantankerous side-kick, Groot (Walter Brennan), break away from a California-bound wagon train. The time is 1851, and Tom wants to go south in search of land to raise a herd of cattle. After a nighttime skirmish with a band of Native Americans, they cross the Red River and ride south through Texas. Along the way they pick up a young boy, Matt (who will grow up to be Montgomery Clift), who has been orphaned by a Native American attack. Nearing the Rio Grande, Tom finally finds the land he wants. “This is it,” he announces, “this is where we start growing good beef.”

Groot agrees. “Sure looks good, Tom. Worth coming 2,000 miles fer.” “Everything a man could want,” says Tom. “Good water and grass – and plenty of it.” It is the boy who raises the legal sticking point. “Who this belong to?” he asks. “To me,” Tom snaps back. “Some day that’ll all be covered with good beef and I’ll put a mark, a brand on ’em, to show they’re mine too.” He proceeds to describe his Red River D brand by drawing it on the ground with a stick, tells Matt he’ll add his “M” to it when he’s earned it, and, being a man of action, sets to work branding his lone bull. No sooner is that done than two Mexican vaqueros ride up. They patrol the range for the owner, Don Diego. When it turns out that he lives some 400 miles south, Groot articulates the legal basis for the squatter’s rights Tom has enacted. “That’s too much land for one man. Why, it ain’t decent. Here’s all this land achin’ to be used and never has been. I tell you it ain’t decent.”

To show he is a reasonable man (and to make sure the audience has the geography straight), Tom offers to split the difference with Don Diego’s emissaries. “What’s that river you were talking about?” he asks.

“El Rio Grande,” the vaquero replies. “But I told you that–”

“Well,” says Tom, interrupting the Mexican, “tell Don Diego that all the land north of the river is mine. Tell him to stay off of it.”

Once again the Mexican explains that Don Diego is the rightful owner of the land, having acquired it many years before by grant and patent from the king of Spain.

“You mean,” says Tom, reducing the Mexican’s legal explanation to its basest bottom line, “he took it away from whoever was here before. Indians maybe?… Well I’m taking it away from him.”

This leads, of course, to a shoot-out: the Mexican draws first but Tom is quicker and kills him with a single shot. When the surviving vaquero decides not to fight, Tom sends him back to tell Don Diego what happened. They bury the dead Mexican and Tom dutifully reads over his grave from his Bible. It’s a brief, cursory ceremony because Tom still needs to brand Matt’s cow. Afterwards, as the bull and the cow drift off to roam his newly acquired land and begin propagating the Dunson herd, Tom predicts that in a decade his brand will be on the gates of “the greatest ranch in Texas.”

Over a series of dissolves that show Tom’s dream materializing he continues his voiceover, providing the justification for stealing the land: it’s in the national interest. “Ten years and I’ll have that brand on enough beef to feed the whole country,” he says. “Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make ’em strong, make ’em grow. But it takes work, and it takes sweat, and it takes time, lots of time. It takes years.”

Creating an empire by boldly taking what he wants and ruthlessly eliminating the competitors in the name of feeding the nation, Tom is the personification of Manifest Destiny. But underneath the film’s majestic surface lie disturbing verities at the heart of Manifest Destiny, which the remainder of Hawks’ film explores. To appreciate the links between America’s civil creed, Manifest Destiny and the film’s opening, let’s delve into the history of how Texas and the Southwest became part of the United States.

From history to narrative in Red River

Act I of Red River gives a highly abbreviated but essentially accurate recap of the origins of the state of Texas. North American settlers did indeed come to Texas, in droves, and liked what they saw. Though it was resolved by 1851 when Red River begins, there was a contested strip of land between the established settlements in central Texas and the Rio Grande, claimed by both Mexico and the USA. Despite losing the battle of the Alamo in 1836, Texas won its independence in the same year and was briefly a republic, then became the 28th state of the Union in 1845. In 1846, the US Army (like Tom Dunson) provoked an attack by Mexicans over the disputed land, getting them to “draw first,” which prompted a swift and deadly response from the USA. That incident led to the Mexican–American War which Mexico lost, forcing it not only to forfeit its claim on the disputed land but also to cede a vast expanse of its northern territories to the USA on top of that (“All the land north of the river is mine.”).

Even the dramatic motivations of Red River’s Anglo-Mexican confrontation scene have their basis in history. The notion of “that’s too much land” for a Mexican – though not too much for an Anglo – is consistent with the sweeping racist and ethnocentric assumptions supporting Manifest Destiny. The land-grabbing and empire building that typified much of the expansion to the Pacific was masked under the guise of national interests, namely strategic military and profitable business interests that summarily negated the interests – and the ownership rights – of any other Latino or Native American peoples or nations. And, as in Tom’s voiceover in Red River, the USA’s entrepreneurial ambitions and fortune-hunting were transformed by contemporary politicians, then later by history books and Hollywood, into a beneficent crusade. North Americans were rightfully and divinely entitled to the land from sea to shining sea – the future well-being of the nation depended upon it.

But, as I’ve said, the rest of Red River complicates such simplistic imperialism. Director Howard Hawks’ development of the character of Tom Dunson and John Wayne’s portrayal of him as a stubborn, unrepentant hard case reveals his tyrannical nature in the course of the cattle drive. In the process, the film exposes the shadow side of the pioneering personality and the dualistic nature of Manifest Destiny: brave but brutal, daring but obsessed, bold but ruthless. Tom Dunson, like Ethan (again John Wayne) in The Searchers (1956), provides a candid display of the two seemingly inseparable sides of Manifest Destiny: the courageous risk-taker and the cold-blooded killer.

Finding whether Tom can proceed beyond violence is the subject of the second half of the film. Red River’s key conflict is animated when Matt takes the cattle drive ...